Gerald R. Ford took on the office of vice president left vacant by the disgraced Spiro Agnew, stepping into a role that he never aspired to play, but taking it on because he believed it was his duty as a citizen and a statesman.

For December we have three Dispatches and an Update. Chris Hondros returns and goes to court with Iraqi prisoners, William B. Plowman looks at gang life in Gary, Indiana, and Veronique de Viguerie takes on the challenge of a story about the prostitution of young Iraqi women in Syria.

After covering the suicide bombing on Benazir Bhutto's convoy last month in Karachi and the events surrounding her return to Pakistan from self-exile, I left for an assignment in Rwanda and then returned to Beirut thinking that I wouldn't be back in Pakistan until the lead-up to their elections a few weeks down the road. How wrong I was.

Iraq, many people might be surprised to learn, has a functioning court system. Well, "functioning" might be too strong a word but it does have an array of non-religious criminal courts run by the Iraqi government.

November 2007

I only met Bilal Hussein once, in Ramadi mid-September of last year, but the story he shared with me as we stood outside the bullet-pocked entryway of the Al Anbar provincial capitol building has stuck with me ever since.

When I first started out in the business someone told me that 5 percent of photojournalism was the actual picture taking and the other 95 percent was the stuff that got you to the place you needed to be to take the picture.

During my simultaneous house restoration and television series production, I had been too busy to deal with the stove, what with alternating surprise bouts of plumbing and sound re-edits, and also the fits of depression that punctuated both processes.

In the first week of September I got an e-mail from a reader who was good enough to inform me that someone was plagiarizing my work on MySpace, and gave me two links, one for the place where the copied work appeared, which my informant claimed was a fake profile, and one for the real profile of the plagiarizer.

September 2007

This month we present three dispatches: Dai Kurokawa reporting on the Thailand-Burma border. Shapiro visited Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, staying with a remarkable family who helps many children while dealing with the alcoholism of a son. In Afghanistan, David Bathgate observes heroin addiction and sees firsthand one of the country's very few treatment centers.

During the 1980s, if you wanted to turn my brother from the even-tempered, easygoing individual that he normally was into a rage-consumed animal, all you had to do was to mention the two words "Margaret Thatcher" within his hearing and that would do it.

Scholars have filled the shelves of the world's great libraries with books and articles about the Indian diaspora, a collective term that describes people who have migrated out of South Asia, but who generally think of themselves as Indian and are tied to the culture of India no matter where they might live.

August 2007

For September we present four dispatches and one update by photographers Marco Di Lauro, Jean Chung, Nasim Goli, Sarah Shatz and Roger Arnold. The first two deal with very different subjects in Afghanistan. Nasim Goli shows us an Iranian national family tradition and Sarah Shatz takes us to Kansas where a May 4 tornado nearly wiped a town off the map. In his update on the CIA's secret war in Laos, Roger Arnold continues his account of the Hmong people's brutal struggle for survival in Laos.

A correspondent who paints queried me the other day about color photography, saying that he remembers being ecstatic the day Kodachrome ASA 64 film came out because it made possible saturation of the blues and reds never achieved before.

Living in Afghanistan for almost one year since the summer of 2006, I've been covering various women's-rights issues such as education and politics. However, I did not realize that Afghanistan has the second highest maternal mortality ratio (MMR) in the world, only after Sierra Leone, as of February 2007.

The most advanced hospital in southern Afghanistan is housed in a tent in the middle of the desert and provides life-saving treatment to the injured personnel of NATO's International Security Assistance Force, Afghan government troops, Taliban fighters and the innocent civilians caught in the middle of the conflict.

I never went to Northern Ireland to photograph "The Troubles"; I had had enough of them here in the U.S.A. The '60s were a rough time here; the anti-war movement was in full swing and I had been documenting it whenever I could.

Sometimes it is interesting to take a refresher course in something one has studied in the past. After initially delving into a subject, it's not uncommon to tuck information away with a confidence that fails to take into account the changing circumstances. New perspectives may be required to forge a new consensus.

A recent column comparing raw files to jpegs generated a fair amount of correspondence, not about the advantages of one form over the other, but how to deal with the limited exposure latitude of jpegs and the limitations of a camera's reflected light, automatic TTL metering.

In June we have three dispatches: Rafael Ben-Ari explores a groundbreaking medical procedure; Philip Poupin reports on the continued dangers of the Afghanistan war, and Danfung Dennis writes of the so-called American surge into the "self-sustaining" conflict in Iraq.

In "What's It All About?" E-Bits Editor Beverly Spicer takes us on a video tour to a struggle for survival on the African savannah, then a fusion of 500 years of portraits of women in art, and finally, to what could only be called a pipe dream.

In April our Dispatch from Derek Flood looks at the conflict in and over Kashmir. In 1947 the territory of Pakistan was split away ("partitioned") from India. Kashmir, located at the juncture of the Indian, Pakistani and Chinese borders, was joined to India by the then-colonial government.

I came to Indian-occupied Kashmir in the context of a larger trip around South Asia to document the fraying edges of the much-hyped Indian ascendancy that I'd been hearing about ad nauseam in the American media over that last few years

For the past 30 years, the photographers of Contact have produced work in nearly every format and style, color and black and white, but there is one constant in our work: it almost always puts people at the forefront.

Fifteen thieves are recently dead nationwide in the U.S., and I, for one, do not mourn them. These were humans who you could rightly judge from afar as none-too-scrupled and even less intelligent, without ever meeting them or assessing them individually.

There are an abundance of dates and events that observers use to mark the beginning of the digital age, but for the media industry, it began in the New Jersey labs of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study in 1954, when a small group of engineers and other scientists created the first computer graphic image.